Nulla pax sincera
by analect
Summary: After his breakdown at the Circle Tower, Cullen is sent to 'recuperate' at a remote chantry in northern Ferelden. However, his recovery is haunted by dark visions, not least those of Ayala Surana... M for dark themes, violence, horror/erotic horror etc.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: **This is a rather dark story, pretty much AU (especially in light of DA2, which seems to delicately omit Cullen's breakdown and the scenarios that may follow), but here it is anyway. After the Circle Tower falls, Cullen is sent to a remote northern chantry to recover from his ordeal... but his grasp on sanity is slim.

_**Definite** **caveat**_ for dark themes, scenes of horror, gore, and general unpleasantness, psychological trauma, erotic horror (later chapters) and so forth. There are also lighter moments. I'd love to know what people think of this one.

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><p><strong>NULLA PAX SINCERA<strong>

~#~#~#~

Nulla in mundo pax sincera  
>sine felle;<p>

Spirat anguis  
>inter flores et colores<br>explicando tegit fel.

_In this world there is no honest peace  
>Free from bitterness;<em>

_The serpent's hiss conceals its venom,  
>as it uncoils itself<br>among blossoms and beauty._

~ _Nulla in mundo pax sincera, _Antonio Vivaldi

~#~#~#~

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><p><strong>CHAPTER ONE<strong>

* * *

><p>Recuperation, they call it, as if what ails him is something that may be mended, like a broken bone or the weakness that follows a fever. They don't understand. Even Greagoir, a man whom he has always admired—a man whose leadership he always thought was sane, and sensible—seems changed somehow.<p>

Cullen recalls the uncomfortable look in the Knight-Commander's eyes as he suggested this little… rest. It is not fair. The others—the few of his brothers who survived the horror, and the templars mobilising in Denerim, and all across the Bannorn—they are marching to war. They will fight for their country, their freedom, and for the Maker, and it is likely they will die… and he will not be among them. He will be here, in this forsaken little blot in the middle of nowhere, forgotten and abandoned on the northwest coast, because they think him mad. Broken. Past repair.

It is not right. He told Greagoir this, told him it wasn't fair, but it did no good. There, in the blood-soaked stone tomb that was once his home, he pleaded, begged the Knight-Commander to see reason, to let him do his duty, die a warrior and pay the blood debt he owes. He heard the panic in his own voice; the high, wailing fury of a child, and it shamed him. He fell to his knees, as he had kneeled for so many days, caged and captive while all around him was torn to screaming, bloody shreds, and he wept.

His commander placed a comforting hand upon his shoulder, raised him up… and Cullen had known there was no sense in arguing any more. He had sealed his own fate.

And so, he is here. The chantry is small, as is the village it serves. Holmar, they call it. No more than a dozen farmsteads dot the surrounding countryside, and the chantry stands between them and the sea. It is a centre for contemplation, apparently. The northerly tip of Ferelden, where the evening air is warm and soft, and the semi-distant cries of gulls haunt the air.

There are a handful of other templars here. Among them are Ser Gedwyn, a man in his sixth decade, who is all but lost to the addled, waking sleep of lyrium, and Ser Jonal, whose wounds are more physical. He was injured in the capture of an apostate, they say, but Cullen does not yet know whether it was honest steel or foul magic that put those bandages across his left eye, and robbed him of his foot. Then there is Ser Doran, who is, he has heard, also here to rest. Cullen knows no more than that; since he arrived, Doran has not left his room, and the sisters and lay brothers here are extremely lenient. They force nothing on anyone, least of all recovery.

Cullen isn't sure that he likes it, so far. The place is made entirely of muddy greens and browns, and the constant salt smell of the sea makes his mouth dry. He isn't used to it yet, though the warm evenings are pleasant enough.

It is evening now, and he sits on a bench near the vegetable garden, watching the dusky breeze ruffle the leaves of winter lettuces. The sisters are kind, though he hasn't been here long enough to learn all their names. He doesn't really want to. He'd like to pretend this is some passing dream, some temporary fancy from which he can wake, and return to the more urgent matters of life.

There is a Blight. He didn't believe it at first. He almost doesn't believe it now, but then everything he thought of as reality has been taken from him, sundered, and resewn into new, strange shapes that do not feel familiar. When they heard the first rumours, the darkspawn were still being dismissed as a minor threat. The Magi made more of it than they needed to, seizing the opportunity to leave the Circle Tower and fly to the king's clarion, just as eager to snuffle up every last glob of glory as Cailan had been.

_Well, it wasn't as easy as they thought, was it? _

The news of Ostagar had barely broken before… before everything fell apart. Cullen knows where he was that day: outside the mages' quarters, walking the corridors with Badin, whose ready wit had sustained the both of them through long hours of drill, back when they were young initiates in Denerim. Friends, he recalls. Friends for a long time.

Cullen remembers how the templars joked about the pointlessness of 'patrol' in those long, empty hallways. All they ever had to watch for were students running late to their lessons, or the occasional experiment exploding in the laboratories. Every so often, some young apprentice would think it funny to cast Tronwheel's Invisible Tripwire, or Lethbridge's Cone of Flatulence, and there might be an opportunity to utilise the talents they'd honed for the purposes of negating dangerous magic… but those were few and far between.

Boredom characterised the majority of life in the Tower. Lots of it. Long, syrupy hours of boredom, broken up with the hundreds of little strands of lives that were not his, and were full of such very different concerns and fears.

Many of his brothers looked down on the mages. Some with pity, others with scorn. He'd seen enough of them to understand their complexity, to view them as individuals who struggled with their burdens, just as everyone did.

Cullen believed then, as he always had, that the Maker formed men with imperfections so that they might learn to rise above them. He did not think there would be anything in the world that could not be bested through faith.

He did not, he knows now, understand.

Evil will swallow the world whole, for it lurks at the heart of everything, inevitable and unstoppable. It is beneath the very ground. It is within all that seems to be good, and pure.

It was within _her_.

Cullen shakes his head bitterly, wishing he could displace the thoughts by so doing. To think there was a time— _no_. He doesn't want to think of it.

She betrayed everything he believed in. She aided the blood mage, Jowan, to destroy his phylactery and escape, and she did not even stay to answer for her crime.

He was glad when she was gone. Stung, and bitter, and wounded, and glad.

It was the judgement of the Maker, he thought. But what judgement returned her to them, after… after what happened, and all the things that went so badly wrong?

Badin died in his arms. So much blood. So much screaming, so much… pain. His friend's body, a blistered mess where fire had engulfed him and welded his flesh to his armour. Every effort to help him, as they hunkered in the doorway of the Great Hall, chaos breaking out all around, had only made his suffering worse.

Cullen's fingers flex slightly against his knees as he sits on the bench, staring out into the dusk. His back is straight, his posture positively regimental, though he wears plain civilian clothes now, and he remembers pulling off his friend's burning gauntlets, and finding them full of blistered, bloody skin. He remembers the bubbling, grating death rattle that passed between flayed, fire-chased lips, and what is worse is not the memory, but the fact it is merely the _first_. It has lost its impact for him now. He recalls the terror, the revulsion and the panic of the moment, but they are feelings that some other man had, some other Cullen who lived then, and who is no longer here. He cannot call on that man—cannot truly draw upon his life, his past, his heart—any more than he can imagine what it is to be a blade of grass, or one of those lettuces that sit so serenely in the tilled earth of the chantry gardens.

Badin is dead. All of his friends are dead, or soon will be. The abominations are dead. _She_… she who walked guiltless from the carnage, who was rewarded for her misdeeds when she should have been sent to Aeonar, _she_ was responsible.

It had been festering there, beneath the surface. That evil. Maleficarum, infesting every inch of the Tower, whispering—always whispering—but no one believed, did they? Or maybe they believed too readily. She had. Too quick to trust, too compassionate, too swayed by her allegiance to her kind.

She has doomed them all.

He should wish her dead, but he cannot.

_Ayala Surana_. Even now, with all that he knows, her name is an exotic breath, a whispered caress that comes in the night to taunt him with his weakness.

He loved her once, Maker forgive him. He loved her, and she betrayed him. And now, she's betrayed them all.

He should have seen it coming.

_**~o~O~o~**_

Jocelyn tipped the heavy pail, and watched with satisfaction as the cool, clean water splashed into the copper. As the Chant said, there was a pure, humble joy to be found in hard work. Of course, it was easy to think that when Mother Cerys' rota had her doing morning chores in the humid warmth of the laundry, instead of outside in the frost-ridden dark, mucking out the pigs.

Mother Cerys said it didn't do for them to grow too settled in their routines, rooted to the same jobs. They must embrace change, she said. Another of her innovative ideas, that, and rumour had it also the reason she was out here in the middle of nowhere, instead of leading a more prestigious chantry in the Bannorn. Not that Jocelyn indulged in the frivolous inconsequence of gossip.

As for herself, she'd never had the opportunity to consider going anywhere else. Her people had farmed in the land surrounding Holmar for generations. She was lucky, she supposed, that she'd been the second of four daughters, with two brothers ahead of her and a baby sister behind. Her elder sisters and one older brother were all already married when she told Pa she wanted to take vows, and he'd agreed readily—quite possibly just out of relief at not having to finance another wedding.

It had been a vocation, though… of sorts. Jocelyn had always known she wanted something different from life, something that went beyond the annual patchwork of life on the downs. She'd trodden the year round enough times to know she loved it—every passing wisp and reliable repetition from shearing to slaughter, and the fairs and festivities that broke up the wheel—but it hadn't called to her bones. She hadn't wanted to take a husband from among the raw-faced, rough-kneed farmhands, and become a wife, a woman like her mother, all sinew and bony elbows tied up in a dirty apron.

Still, she was a part of the land. This place, precariously balanced between the mountains and the sea, with its great rolling swathes of green undulating softly away from the cliffs, as if to soothe the storms before they reached the plains. On a clear day, from the chantry's bell tower, they could see the occasional ship caught on the crossing to the Marches, far beyond the Waking Sea. In her first years as a lay sister, before she took her vows, Jocelyn had wondered what it would be like to journey across those forbidding waters. She'd dreamed a thousand fantasies about the lands beyond, but they didn't trouble her these days. Here, within the folds of her community and her cloistered life, she knew peace, and that was enough.

"Goodness' sake, girl! Are you going to stand there all day, or get these linens on to boil?"

Jocelyn blinked, flinching guiltily at the sound of Sister Honoria's strident tones. Though she was technically a lay sister, and in reality effectively a servant of the chantry, the woman had over the years become responsible for running the laundry and a goodly part of the kitchens. She was indispensable, extremely practical, and well used to having her commands followed to the letter.

"Of course, Sister," Jocelyn said calmly, and set down the pail, readying to hoist the first bag of washing into the copper.

Holmar's chantry might have been small in comparison to more metropolitan parts of the country, but they still generated plenty of grubby smallclothes, and that wasn't even touching on the bandages, sheets, and other laundry that came from by the patients currently residing in Sister Bronwith's infirmary.

"'Ave you seen that new lad yet?" Sister Honoria asked, bustling up behind Jocelyn and wiping her meaty hands on a dishcloth as she peered over the initiate's shoulder, into the steaming depths of the copper. "The templar?"

Jocelyn frowned. "Cullen? Yes. Yesterday afternoon."

Honoria helped her empty the linens into the slowly heating water, and took up the long wooden paddle used to tamp them down. Her wide, red face creased into a worried frown, with pale, wispy curls frizzing in a coronet around her forehead.

"I 'eard he in't right."

"Shouldn't think so," Jocelyn said, bending to stoke the fire beneath the copper. "That's why he's here: to get better."

Sister Honoria tutted. "That in't what I mean, and you know it, Sister. _You_ know… all that business at the Tower. Is it true?"

Jocelyn fed a few bits of kindling into the burgeoning yellow flames. They warmed her face; licking at the little brick furnace and dancing against years' worth of accumulated soot and scorch marks.

"What, abominations and maleficarum running riot through the halls, until the illustrious Grey Wardens arrived to quell the damage? I shouldn't think it's half as exciting as the rumours make out, Sister. Things rarely are," she added, straightening up and brushing her palms against her robe. "Besides, we mustn't gossip."

"In't gossiping," Sister Honoria said defensively, jabbing the paddle into the copper and giving the laundry a good prod. "I'm just curious. We know _something_ went on, don't we? Just that nobody's saying what. Stands to reason that boy knows summat, and someone ought to—"

"_Someone_," Jocelyn said pointedly, "should remember that we are living in exceptional times. We… should pray that they are less exceptional than certain rumours suggest."

Honoria's mouth tightened, and a moment's tense, hot silence settled between the two women. The fire crackled, and the copper began to heat up, the water starting to roil. Sister Honoria churned the linens, her heavy jaw set into a gesture of implacable, defiant neutrality, and Jocelyn sighed.

These were troubling times indeed.

News from the south had been getting progressively worse over the past month. The civil war was one thing, but the other…. She hardly dared frame the word in her mind. _Blight_. No one up here had believed it at first. Mad follies, they'd said, until the first refugees started trickling through. The fear came with them, gusting up from the valley like a dark wind, and hanging blackly over everything, corrupting all it touched.

Holmar rarely got word of anything quickly, or accurately, for that matter. Not until a long while after it had happened, at least. Mother Cerys said they had to guard against seizing on snippets of information, and reading too much into this unrest and chaos.

She'd agreed, at first. Of course, that was before _he_ arrived.

They hadn't been told much about Cullen; they weren't usually told much about any of the resident guests who came to them to convalesce, other than the most basic of information. Yet the templar who had accompanied him on his arrival—a large, heavily built man with a great, dark beard and a sealed letter from Greagoir, the Knight-Commander of the Circle Tower, addressed to Mother Cerys personally—had spoken of such terrible things! Abominations and rebellion in the Tower, demons stalking the halls… wholesale death and destruction. It was no wonder she had seen such a blank, haunted emptiness in the young man's face, Jocelyn supposed. The things he must have witnessed….

His companion—guardian, perhaps—had said Cullen had been lucky to survive. He'd been rescued by the Grey Wardens, allegedly, but Jocelyn was aware Mother Cerys pretended not to know that, just as _they _were all to pretend they hadn't heard it said. Nobody needed the association with an order so recently declared outlaw, although if the rumours filtering up from the south were even partway true—well, they couldn't be, of course. A bastard son of King Maric and an elven mage, carrying the banner of the Griffon Riders, and moving across the country, perpetually one step ahead of the regent's army… it was like something out of a storybook.

They _said_ the Wardens were raising their own forces, and meant to move against Teyrn Loghain. Not that the people of Holmar and its environs cared much about politics. Anything that didn't relate directly to the farming calendar was considered irrelevant to the serious business of life, and even Bann Ricard knew not to trouble people unduly for things like rent or taxes… especially after the year the two revenue men he sent ended up tied together and tossed in the mill pond in the middle of the village. The pond was less than a foot deep, of course, but _they_ hadn't known that.

No, Holmar had little time for strife and unrest. It got in the way of life.

Jocelyn worried, though. If things were truly as bad as people said, then their isolated existence would only protect them for so long. She'd been tempted to press the templar who'd brought Cullen to them for further details, but he'd left under cover of dark; heading off, apparently, back to the Tower and the war that he said was coming. Not just petty power struggles, either.

Before this ended, he'd said, they would all face their demons. Every last one of them—and they'd be lucky if they survived.


	2. Chapter 2

_A/N: As with everything at the moment, apologies for the long delay. Will try not to leave it so long before the next update!_

_In this chapter, Cullen is tormented by visions both horrific and seductively disturbing, and Jocelyn wonders how to help. Caveat for horror and mild rudeness. _

* * *

><p><strong>CHAPTER TWO<strong>

* * *

><p>In his cage, he lost track of what was real. He knows this. Greagoir spoke of it to him before he—<p>

_Sent me away_

—organised for the recuperation.

There is no shame in it, apparently. It is what demons do. They slide their fingers into your mind, soft and sinuous as spider-silk, and then they crack you open and read your heart. They take your secrets and turn them against you; bleed your fears until you weep for mercy.

They can turn the world into a mirror, and take it apart, shard by shard, and this they did to him.

He remembers it all.

From his cage, Cullen was forced to watch the corpse of his friend rise and walk towards him. The scorched and bloody skin had hung from his face and hands, the burned flesh bare where Cullen had tried to pull off his gauntlets and helm… had tried so very hard to help him.

At first, Badin-who-was-not-Badin simply walked, disjointed and lurching like a puppet, but then his head swivelled towards Cullen, and he gave a flayed, skeletal smile. It was horrific, but it was not real.

Worse than this were the visions that came after, when the corpse shambled over to him and sat, companionably, on the other side of his prison. The smell of charred meat seeped through the pulsing walls of light and the bars that held him—choking him, pressing down upon him though there were not even physical things (oh! How weak these mortals!)—were no defence against it.

Badin talked then. Amiable, cheerful chatter of the kind they had shared on endless days of patrol… and Cullen had known he was losing his mind.

Or, more accurately, it was being taken from him.

They had found his memories, and they were emptying them out, like children with boxes of ribbons, mixing up the shapes and colours with an innocent joy and curiosity… and yet there was nothing innocent about it.

He does not know how long he endured burned-face, eyeball-less, Badin-skull-creature telling the joke about the one-armed pirate and the qunari mercenary, over and over and over again. Each time, the movement of the creature's mouth seemed to match the words a little better, and Cullen was almost distracted by that for a while.

They showed him horrors, indeed. They groped inside his head, and they found his mother and his brothers, and their wastrel of a father, drunk and scything the air with the broad strap of his belt, roaring incoherent anger at an unfeeling world. The memories of the blows rained upon Cullen's body, and they felt just as real as they ever had. He relived his templar training, and the teasing of the other boys, and the disdain of the old Knight-Commander in Denerim, who had never believed he was good enough, and the demons tried to make him believe he _had_ failed. His vigil, the night before taking his vows, returned to him, with all its doubt and insecurity, but all he had to do was look down at the armour he wore, and unclasp his sweating hands long enough to trace the sacred heraldry on the breastplate, and _know_ that he belonged. That he _was_ dedicated to the Maker's work, to the will of something good and pure.

He angered them, he thinks. They would have preferred him to break. If that had been the case, his death would have been no less swift than Badin's. Instead, they determined to taunt him, to stretch out his punishment and test his limits. He suspects they competed amongst themselves.

Certainly, the visions came in different flavours, as if wrought by separate hands, each as filthy and twisted as the last.

They were peopled with the faces he saw every day. There was Irving, naked and smeared with shit, screaming gibberish as he danced in circles, beating the head of his staff against the ground. Enchanter Wynne, rutting on the floor with Greagoir. Impossibilities and indignities alike were burned into the dark spaces behind his eyes. Men he'd spent years living alongside, whooping and yelling like lunatics… unreal scenes that, yet, in all their hideous surrealism, he could not forget, and could not pretend he had never seen.

He sees them now, in his sleep. Even the things he knows are untrue. They echo, like cries against cold stone, like the screams of men dying in flames, and he _knows _they are the memories put there by demons, the filth of their touch spreading like corruption even now in his mind, and he must resist, _will_ resist….

And, with these thoughts, with these damp, fervid murmurs on his lips, he awakes in the small chamber in the infirmary of Holmar's chantry, and it is dark and his sheets are wet.

There is shame, and anguish, and Cullen slides from the bed and curls up on the hard wooden floor, in much the same position as he spent those long, long days and nights, and he weeps in soundless, racking, breathless cries. He smothers his mouth and nose with his sweat-slicked hands, and rocks as his lungs scream for air. He does not dare let anyone hear, does not dare to make a sound.

When sleep comes again, it is cold and unkind, and folds him swiftly into its grasp. He does not awake again until the fat lay sister with the double chin is banging on his door and threatening him with a tray of porridge. By this time, his joints ache and his muscles are sore from lying hunched on the boards… and there is still the matter of the soiled sheets.

The woman who comes in—he has been told her name, but did not really listen—and thrusts the porridge at him makes him sit at the small wooden table by the window. She puts a spoon into his hand and stands over him until he at least starts to eat. Maker, it is foul… like glue and sawdust. He struggles to keep each mouthful down, but she is a vile bulldog of a creature and doesn't let him be until she can see he _is_ eating, and swallowing.

It gives him something to focus on as she turns and, without a word, strips the piss-soaked bedding. She opens the tiny window before she leaves, saying something to him about eating the whole bowl of the Void-taken foulness in front of him, and the smell of winter honeysuckle drifts in on the cool air.

Cullen breathes it in and, slowly, turns his face to the window. He feels the touch of weak sunlight upon his cheek, and motes of dust spin gently above the table, trapped in the beautiful cage of a gold-tinged sunbeam.

_**~o~O~o~**_

Jocelyn whistled as she carried the buckets of scraps and turnip tops down to the pigpen. Gertie, Clarice, Cinders and Dorothy were, as usual, pleased to see her, and she found herself greeted by a chorus of snuffles, snorts and talkative porcine noises.

"Morning, girls!" she said brightly, tipping the swill into the trough.

The pigs ploughed in with tails twitching and great, floppy ears nodding enthusiastically. Jocelyn leaned over the fence and scratched one fat, hairy back as she eyed the four of them for general health and condition. Satisfied, she slapped Gertie cheerfully on the rump and straightened up, dusting her hands against her robe.

Across the yard, between the chantry's collection of long, low outbuildings and the fenced-in vegetable garden, Ser Jonal was accompanying Ser Gedwyn for a gentle constitutional. Neither had been in Holmar for long, although the younger man already seemed to be forging a compassionate friendship with the other knight. Gedwyn's fragmented mind rarely lingered in the present—it seemed to Jocelyn that he preferred the glories of past battles and the memories of long-dead brethren to the rather less dignified deterioration of his body—but Jonal dealt well with him. Hobbling on his wooden crutch, with the leg of his trousers pinned halfway down the shin to keep the stump clean, and the bandages still swathed across his eye, he managed to smile, and to keep the old templar anchored near enough in the real world.

Jocelyn watched as they headed down towards the pond, where ducks quacked and turned lazy figures of eight on the still, dark water, and the acid greens of lily pads and blanket weed cut across the reflections of the trees. Ser Jonal pointed, leaning heavily on his crutch, and Ser Gedwyn nodded, smiled… seemed to make some comment about something.

It was, Jocelyn decided, a good thing. It deserved encouragement. Mother Cerys often said how human nature was, at its core, a wonderful thing, and how the spirit was surprisingly resilient. People learned to heal if you gave them a chance, and gave them time. If you were lucky, all you needed to do was nudge them in the right direction.

A breeze picked up, stirring the skirts of Jocelyn's robe. She shivered, a little surprised at the coolness of the air. Easy to forget, when the sun was bright and the sky so clear, that winter would soon be upon them. The autumn had stretched out into a long one, wound around with bright days and warm evenings. They would be planning for Harvest Festival before long. Brother Vintner had already been seen disappearing into one of the outbuildings to sample the parsnip wine he'd put down last year, and Jocelyn smiled at the recollection. The stuff was evil-smelling, virulently potent, and tasted faintly of socks—inasmuch as you _could_ actually taste anything after the first sip—but it was an indelible part of the calendar, and she loved it. There was something so terribly soothing about watching the year roll round, and feeling the comforting lull of the seasons.

It almost made her forget the things they were hearing from the south.

Refugees were pouring out now. Sister Bethan, who had family across country, said she'd had a letter from her cousin telling of the scores of people fleeing straight north. The Blight had burst out of the valley, and those with any means of leaving were doing just that. Many seemed to believe Ferelden would fall, either to the darkspawn or the civil war. Holmar, remote as it was, remained so far untouched by either threat, but Maker alone knew how long _that_ would last.

Jocelyn watched the two templars meander out of sight, Ser Gedwyn smiling cheerfully at whatever version of reality he was currently enjoying, and Ser Jonal coping better than he had with the crutch, and the lop-sided, weighted way of walking that he'd adopted.

There was a great deal of gossip filtering through the chantry concerning the civil war. Bann Ricard would, Sister Honoria reckoned, come down on Teyrn Loghain's side, because better the devil you knew, but it depended on which way West Hill went. Jocelyn was inclined to agree. Ricard's lands were sparsely populated, difficult to defend, and needed the protection of larger neighbours. If the things people spoke of in the south were even halfway true, and they spilled this far north, they'd be lucky to see a blade of grass or a scorched tree still standing.

A chorus of grunting and snorting alerted Jocelyn to the girls having finished their breakfast, so she grabbed the pig board and yard broom from where they were propped against the flint-knapped wall, and ventured into the pen.

It was, she thought, like the man who'd accompanied Ser Cullen had said. Things would get worse before they got better.

She'd prayed for a quick resolution. Mother Cerys said they all should; pray for the soul of poor King Cailan, and those lost to this evil, and pray that Ferelden's strife came to an end and that the suffering of the innocents was eased. There was something in the Chant about that… the light of the Maker's blessing comforting the destitute, and His mercy succouring the needy.

Jocelyn frowned down at the tide of slurry washing ahead of her broom, and wondered how their sister chantries in the south were managing the influx of refugees. The Bannorn was wealthy, certainly by comparison, but the needy and destitute still needed food, clothes, and somewhere dry and warm to sleep and, for all His mercy, the Maker could be a bit shaky on the practical matter of providing clean blankets and bread.

That was one of the things that bothered her about this Grey Warden business. All right, so—_allegedly_—there was a son of King Maric's involved. Rightful heir to the throne and all that. Thing was, even if they pitched battle against the Regent and won, what would it mean for the country in the long term? Heroes were all very well, but people needed solid governance.

Of course, it wouldn't end up mattering at all, either way, if the war dragged on and there was no one left to fight the darkspawn. She'd asked Mother Cerys about that, too: didn't the Chantry have a responsibility to weigh in and try to settle matters? The Revered Mother had just shaken her head and said it wasn't their place to question, and the Grand Cleric would understand things far more clearly than they did.

Jocelyn supposed that was probably true. She got on with her chores, in any case, because until there were actually monsters teeming across the downs, there were still stalls that needed scrubbing, laundry that wanted doing, and the vegetable garden to be weeded.

She was busily engaged on that last task—kneeling in the dark, soft earth, mucky apron on and trowel in hand—when she spotted a surprising figure on the path that led back up to the chantry. Jocelyn wiped her wrist across her forehead, squinted, and smiled.

"Ser Cullen?"

The young templar stopped guiltily, a panic-stricken look crossing his face. Jocelyn started to get to her feet, and held out a hand, brandishing the trowel at him.

"It's all right… I'm just weeding."

He stood awkwardly, like a man caught mid-way between flight and protest, his dark eyes wide and his chestnut hair ruffled by the breeze.

"Good to see you out and about," Jocelyn said, which was true. He barely left his chamber most of the time. "You sit out here of an evening sometimes, don't you?"

He stared at her and, not for the first time, she suppressed a shiver at the look of desolate blankness in his face. After a moment, Cullen blinked, cleared his throat, and nodded.

"Y-yes," he managed, then turned pale and looked at his feet.

Jocelyn's smile widened and she nodded at the vegetable garden. "How d'you think the squashes are doing? They're healthy enough, but they look small to me. Sister Elspeth always grows her own for Harvest, and she manages to get them big as you've ever seen. No idea how she does it."

Cullen raised his head. "Squashes?"

Jocelyn gestured to the neat rows of plants beyond the winter lettuces, all dark, broad leaves and small, regular fruits. Some were deep, glossy viridian, striped with paler green, and some a creamy tan colour, their tough skins concealing vivid orange flesh.

"They're good split and roasted, with butter and sage," she said helpfully. "Or rosemary."

The young templar looked nonplussed. Jocelyn exhaled, and propped her hand on her hip. The things they said that boy had seen didn't bear thinking about. He wasn't all that much older than her, she realised. She tipped her head to the side.

"Maybe I need to feed them more. D'you think that's it?"

Cullen blinked. He frowned slightly, but he did look at the vegetables, and seemed to actually see them, which was a step up from the way he appeared to coast through most of his waking hours.

Jocelyn watched the way his brow furrowed, as if the incipient lines there were carved into his skin, set patterns for his face to follow. As if he always waiting for something to frown about, maybe. He blinked again, and raised his dark eyes nervously to hers.

"We had a garden," he said, his voice hollow. "Behind the… behind the tower. Our gardener, he… pinched the tops off."

He raised one hand, and his fingers made a tentative pincer movement in the air, as if it was something he'd seen in a dream. His face seemed to cloud over, and Jocelyn leaped on the trailing opportunity of the words.

"Ooh, that's a good idea, isn't it? Pinch 'em out so they put all their growin' into the fruits, not the leaves. I see. Well, now… I bet that's what Sister Elspeth does. I shall try that, ser. Thank you."

Cullen smiled faintly, though it didn't reach his eyes. It was a gesture of politeness, she realised, a reflex reaction he probably didn't even know about. She bit the inside of her lip and looked down the row of winter lettuces.

"'Course," she said thoughtfully, "I've all this weeding to finish first. I know it's an imposition, ser, but I don't suppose you can spare me two minutes to help? I've a spare trowel, if you want."

That look of confusion came over him again, and she supposed she'd overstepped the mark… but then he nodded slowly, and made his way down onto the soft tilth. Jocelyn guided him, put the trowel into his hand, and a canvas kneeler between his clean civilian trousers and the mud.

He was clumsy and inept, like a child. She had to show him what needed to be grubbed out, and what was to stay, and she chatted to him as they worked, talking about everything from the pigs to the lettuces, and the vagaries of the work rota in the chantry's laundry. Mother always said she used to run off at the mouth when she didn't know what to say to someone.

All the same, Cullen seemed happy enough with it. He worked until the job was done, the dirt ingrained into his hands, smeared into the lines of his palms and fingers, and ground into the beds of his nails. They didn't mention the Circle Tower, or the war, or the Blight, and yet none of those things seemed very far away. Jocelyn could taste them on the air, like the bitter metal of an approaching storm.

"Thank you," she said when they were finished, and Cullen laid the trowel back in her tool basket. She winced at his grubby fingers. "Maker love us, look at the state I've let you get in, ser. Here, let me—"

Jocelyn reached out with the flannel cloth she kept in amongst the tools for wiping hands clean, and took hold of his wrist.

Cullen flinched away, and she pulled back, alarmed by the way he caught his breath… as if he was truly afraid of her. Wide, dark eyes met hers, stained with uncertainty, and he rose to his feet, wiping his hands awkwardly against the tails of his shirt.

Jocelyn's lips twitched into a moue of disapproval as she watched the smears of mud appear across the pale fabric. She twisted the cloth in her fingers, and inclined her head.

"All right, then, ser. Well… thank you. Perhaps we'll see you in the refectory for supper?"

Cullen's arms hung loosely at his sides. He started to shake his head, and Jocelyn inwardly cursed herself for pushing him too far, too fast, but then his slack lips began to bend themselves around small, tentative words.

"I… maybe."

It was a start, she thought, as he turned and fairly fled back up the path.

_**~o~O~o~**_

The shame, he can bear. The anger, the guilt… he owes these things. He owes them to his brothers-in-arms, who died while he lived, and he owes them to Greagoir, his Commander, to whom his loyalty does not waver, despite the confusion and resentment that lingers in his heart.

Yet there are other things—cruel, secret, wicked things—that he cannot withstand. _They_ are what make him turn and run from the initiate with the clear blue eyes and the fresh-scrubbed, round face.

She was kind to him. She asked him to help her, instead of offering the trowel like a medicine, and she talked to him as if he was a man, not a husk… a shell, dried up and useless, as detached from all that he knows he is—knows he has _been_—as the moultings of a snake are from the litheness of its serpent's body.

He does not want their pity. These women, they come at him with smiles and kindness, and he does not trust it. He is afraid of it, afraid of _them_… afraid of what hides in the dark.

The dreams come again that night, but they are not the bright, screaming insanities of visions he knew to be false. They are not the mad blades of surreal horror, the things with which the demons beat him, blunt and ineffective as they were.

_She _comes.

It is just like it was in the Tower. He had already withstood so much, and he expected more. He was prepared for that… and yet there is no great roar of madness. No naked Irving, no bloody corpses dancing as their entrails burst. There is just a small, slight figure, at first a shadow in the dimness, and then a whisper of movement.

Her robe is blue; the jewel-like blue that illuminates manuscripts and ancient maps, but a little paler. Gold embroidery chases the cuffs, and her belt is worked in delicate filigree. Soft leather slippers encase her small, fine-boned feet, and her hands stretch before her like twin birds, graceful and elegant.

Her dark skin has a subtle sheen to it; a slightly golden hue that warms the deep brown tones. She wears her hair oiled, pulled back and pinned at the crown of her head, where it fountains in a mass of tight curls. If she unbound it, he is sure it would reach her shoulders, and it would have a life of its own, and wrap itself around him.

Her heavy-lidded eyes are perfectly almond-shaped, and dark enough to be considered black. It is hard to tell what thoughts lie behind them but he knows that, when she is happy, they grow warm and lively, and she throws back that beautiful, beautiful head, and lets out a light, musical laugh, and she is the embodiment of joy.

She smiles as she sees him. That wide, full mouth that he cannot help but call sensuous—because it _is_, Maker save him… it is a mouth that bites into berries, and lets the juice run down its lips, voluptuous and unrepentant—curls so deliciously, and her small, white, even teeth glimmer like pearls.

"Cul-len…."

She calls his name, sing-song, as if he is a recalcitrant child, unwilling to come to her. He wants nothing more. She tilts her head, and her long, delicate ears beg to be touched. Her slender elven body, outlined so clearly by the robe that seems tighter now than it did before, is an impossibly voluptuous blend of slim lines and powerful curves. Her hips and breasts strain at the fabric, yet he could cup her waist with two hands. He itches to do so, to rip off his armour and pull her into his arms, to crush her to him and feel her warmth against his flesh. He has thought of it so many times… woken, sweating and stained with his shame, the proof of his sin enfolding him in this irresistible lust.

Those small, pretty hands trail down the front of her robe, tracing the path his fingers would take. She sighs as she touches her breasts. He swears he sees her nipples peak beneath the fabric, but he is ashamed of looking, of _wanting _to look… and yet he does. Then she places her hands flat against her ribs, pointed together so that they form an arrow. Her nails are dark pink and perfectly oval, buffed to a glossy shine. The arrow slips down her belly until she reaches her crotch, and she gives a soft gasp of desire before pushing one hand between her legs, bunching the fabric of her robe in her palm. She twists it, as if she is in the grip of an urgency she cannot bear, and flexes her hips. He stares, and thinks she may lift the robe and pleasure herself right there before him, but she does not.

"Did you miss me?" she croons, as she takes the hand away, and allows the robe to fall back into place, albeit slightly crumpled. He can't stop staring at that creased 'v' of fabric. "I've missed you. Why won't you come to me?"

Cullen shakes his head, but does not reply. The dream does not require him to; _she_ does not require it. This is not real.

He repeats those words to himself, until they thrum through the core of the dream, and yet it does nothing. Ayala Surana still sways closer to him, and he still smells the jasmine oil she wore, and she kisses him the way no woman has ever kissed him. Her mouth is an unquenchable flame, an endless pool…. She snares his lower lip between her teeth and tugs upon it, and the lust rises in him, because he is weak and base and profane, and he wants her.

Somehow, in the dream, he is no longer wearing his armour. His protection, his shell, is gone, replaced by the worn nightclothes and the tangled sheets of his bed in the room at the top of the chantry's infirmary wing. Ayala Surana straddles his lap, and he swears he can hear the thin mattress creak in the dark chamber.

She takes his hands, presses them to her breasts, and he can feel the weight and the supple, yielding warmth of her flesh through the smooth, slippery fabric of her robe. Her nipples harden against his palms, and she groans approvingly into his mouth.

She undresses him slowly, trailing her smooth, sharp nails against his skin. He shivers, and it pleases her to tease him. She is silk and jasmine and desire, and she kisses his chest, tonguing and biting his nipples as she squirms above him. He is hard enough for the smallclothes he still wears to be an uncomfortable confinement, and he feels her heat, her want, pressing down on him in a way that is more real than any torment in the Tower.

Her long, slender fingers work busily at the laces of her robe. He reaches out, but he doesn't touch her. His hands are lost in the cold emptiness of a void, and there seems to be metal and stone beneath them. He groans, twists his head against the coarse-woven pillow, and his mind is full of treacheries. She touches his forehead, her words a gentle whisper, and she murmurs his name, tells him all will be well… he just has to wake up.

Cullen opens his eyes, and the dream engulfs him.

A handful of times, he had heard templars boast in the barracks rooms of favours given them by mage wenches. It did happen, though it was frowned upon. Those who entangled themselves with mages—whether in consensual affection, or the more serious matters of demanding obligations—were soon reassigned elsewhere, or recalled to Denerim. There was little tolerance of indiscretions. It undermined discipline.

_She_ was like that. All the austerity, the authority… she accepted it, but only because it did not truly touch her. All the Circle's rules, she treated as if they were merely something to abide by until she changed her mind; as if it was all some kind of game. He cannot help but recall how she used to speak to him. She had none of the reticence so many of the students did, no qualm about talking to a templar. If she wished to pass the time of day with him, she would do so, and what was the harm in that?

He wonders, now, if she was testing him, gauging him for weakness. She knew nothing of propriety, of discipline or rules… look how easily she threw them off, how little she thought of the Circle, to betray everything they stood for in one moment. It was wickedness, he knows. He is sure.

Perhaps wickedness is what drew him to her in the first place. Perhaps the core of darkness in her pulled him, speaking in twisted whispers to the things that lurk in his soul.

It seems a rational explanation. Yes. Sin shall find thee out, and sin shall find out sin. He does not recall the exact canticle, but the meaning seems clear.

She is naked now, her body shrouded by the shadows of this strange little room where he has been sent because they do not want him. _She_ wants him. She is gold-toned and soft, her slender elven frame a poem of curves and delicate planes. She throws back her head as she sinks onto his length, and cups her breasts in her hands, a fierce and tender smile wreathing her face.

He whimpers, racked by the intensity of feelings he has never known in his waking life. The demons sought these desires from him, these terrible things he would indulge in the secret, dark spaces of the night, when he touched himself and thought of her. They took his foolish fancies, and they gave them life, flesh… power.

She draws him to her, her legs wrapped around his waist and her arms around his neck, and she is ruthless and unstoppable.

Cullen clings to her, breathes her in, tastes the sweet, perfumed sweat on her skin and feels the shaking, panting gasps that echo between them. He kisses her, seeks her lips the way he never dared to do, because he could not bear to pollute her. His sin was not hers, and yet now everything about them is joined. They are one, and he loves her. He can admit it, and her name is dragged from him over and over again, a prayer amid the blasphemies that drop from his lips as she rides his body, cresting his pleasure with her own.

She pulls his hair, scratches his face and back… bites his shoulder when her climax breaks over the two of them, and her long, low growls of animalistic fury sear into his soul. He is bleeding, he thinks. It hurts. Her moans grow sharp and raw, and she lifts her head to rake his mouth with a hungry, jagged kiss. He loses himself then, the last shred of his self-control gone as he arches against her, inside her, his hands clutching hard enough to bruise, and a dry, hoarse cry breaking from his throat.

_You are mine, Cullen. Do not forget it._

When he wakes, he feels cold. The chamber is wreathed with the thick, heavy darkness that comes between the moon setting and the sun rising, and the sheets are dry.

Cullen sits with his arms wrapped around his knees, and watches the small, narrow window for the first smudges of light to begin breaking the dawn. His lips move softly around the remembered shapes of morning prayers, and he lifts his hand to his shoulder, absently fingering the place that bears no bite mark, and yet feels sore to the touch.

Slowly, the sun starts to rise.


End file.
